All cities have histories, but some seem to have histories that attract particular interest, or play an outsized role in shaping their character. Tokyo is, perhaps, one such: there are numerous books examining its past (for example: Tokyo Before Tokyo by Timon Screech or Anna Sherman’s The Bells of Old Tokyo) and even a podcasts-cum-walking…
A midnight phone call can mean one of three things: a wrong number, a robocall or a terrible emergency. When suburban Bostonian, Claire Litvak receives a phone call from someone at the American consulate in Shanghai, it’s of the third variety: her daughter Lindsey is in the hospital on life support after she was hit…
Russia came late to Japan, but devoted considerable energies to grappling with one of the world’s great intelligence challenges and penetrating the insular Asian nation once the Japanese shifted in the latter half of the 19th century from a policy of restricted contact with the outside world to one of imperial competition with Moscow and…
One More Story About Climbing a Hill: Stories from Assam is the latest book by renowned Assamese writer Devabrata Das. This collection of eighteen short stories, translated from the Assamese original, offers a unique and varied portrait of contemporary Assam. Remarkably, despite being translated by several individuals, including the author himself, the prose maintains a…
Ancient India is a new publication and exhibition by the British Museum that explores the shared origins of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain devotional art in figurative imagery of India’s ancient nature spirits. These three of the world’s major religions originated in India and gradually spread to other regions of the world. Between 200 BCE and…
South Korea is famous for its workaholic culture: although things are slowly changing, white collar workers often feel pressure to work long hours and to satisfy every whim of their superiors in a rigidly hierarchical company structure. There is pressure to spend evenings at company dinners and even weekends hiking with the team. Among OECD…
Pakistani writer Faiqa Mansab’s second novel The Sufi Storyteller is a South Asian take on stories about stories blended with a murder mystery. It opens with a murder in the library which doubles up as the office of the protagonist Layla, an expert on women and their role in storytelling traditions teaching at a university…
Globalization has polarized people into nativists and cosmopolites. Nowhere is that truer than in India. The nativist reaction in India to profound technological, commercial and social changes of today takes refuge in the myth of an unchanging, hermetically sealed, and eternal civilization. Audrey Truschke’s 600-page survey of five millennia of history shows how misguided this…
Sixth-grader Lina Uesugi received a strange set of instructions from her father before the beginning of summer vacation: “Go to the Misty Valley. There’s a person there who was good to me years ago.” He didn’t explain to her why she should go or what will happen when she arrives. He simply put her on…
Japanese painters, printmakers, and sculptors who produced artwork in support of Tokyo’s war efforts in the period between 1931 and 1945, had to pivot as they continued their careers in the shadow of empire during the seven-year US occupation occupation, which began with Japan’s defeat in 1945 and ended in 1952 under a Cold War…
Few cities in the world can be as unknown to outsiders as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and The Book of Sana’a is the first major collection of Yemeni fiction in translation.
TS Eliot concludes his 1922 poem, “The Waste Land”, with three words: Shantih Shantih Shantih. This Sanskrit term for peace is the title of Daryl Qilin Yam’s novella that centers around the implausible idea of a quick snowfall in Singapore in the middle of the night when most people are still asleep. Yam weaves twelve…
“Writers on writing” is a genre in itself, one to which readers flock. However, Indian authors, especially those writing in regional Indian languages, are rarely represented in this genre meant for the internationally-acknowledged the-Western-and-the-famous. Therefore, Hindi writer Geet Chaturvedi’s The Master of Unfinished Things, translated into English by Anita Gopalan, will come as a breath…
The increasing number of memoirs and novels set in China over the past couple of decades fall into two broad buckets. A handful of Americans taught English in China and returned to write memoirs around the same time as Chinese immigrants to the US and UK began to find success as fiction writers, both in…
Macau, to its understandable chagrin, often seems an afterthought: to Hong Kong which overtook it, to Canton when it came to China trade, to Manila and the eponymous galleons when it came to being an entrepôt of global status, in the history of Western colonialism and imperialism in East Asia generally and today when it…